Evidence for harm reduction

The evidence for harm reduction is clear: Harm reduction saves lives, reduces the burden of disease and improves the lives of people who inject drugs and the communities they live in. The following documents published by the World Health Organization, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UNAIDS and others all agree that needle and syringe programmes and opioid substitution therapy work, and they do not carry disproportionate risk. The following graph shows the difference in HIV infections among people who inject drugs for countries that were early adopters of harm reduction strategies, those that delayed, and those that did not implement harm reduction.